You can’t be a good Oscar prognosticator unless you’ve seen most of the nominees—or at least a few more than whoever your competition is. This week brings a few more chances to fill up your punch card.

Foremost on the list is the annual package of the Oscar-nominated short films, presented as usual in two packages, live-action and animated films.

If you can’t get to both, don’t leave it to a coin flip: The animated shorts is the one to see. The point of an animated film is to show us something in a way that live action can’t do, and by that standard, most of these nominees pass with flying colors.

My own favorite is “World of Tomorrow” by Don Hertzfeldt, whose “It’s Such a Beautiful Day’” you may have seen at Squeaky Wheel in early 2014. Though his characters are aggressively simple, little more than stick figures, his imagination is boundless. This short looks at the future of human memory and intelligence as a woman from the future pays a visit to the modern child who is her forebear.

Much more lavish is “Bear Story,” which tells the story of a bear via characters in an elaborately designed diorama, using what I assume are stop-motion figures. Filled with detail, it’s sad in a subtle way (especially if you know anything about the history of bears as performing animals) and an allegorical one as well (director Gabriel Osorio was inspired by his grandfather’s exile in Pinochet’s Chile). But it can be experienced just as well on a surface level.

Traditional hand-drawn animation brings to life a touching story in “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos,” about two childhood friends who grow up to become astronaut candidates. It’s from Russia, but like “Bear Story” contains no dialogue.

The other nominees are “Sanjay’s Super Team,” standard Pixar fare, and “Prologue,” a recreation of a battle in ancient Greece which is so violent that it is being presented with a warning to take children out of the room. To fill the bill, the program includes four other unpreviewed shorts that were on the nomination short list.

I wish I could recommend the live-action shorts as strongly, but having watched all of them I have to wonder at the criteria being used by the nominating committee: Given the number of short films made every year, like most of these by fledgling directors trying to show what they can do, it’s hard to believe they couldn’t have done better. From the UK, “Stutterer “ is the tale of a young man with a speech disorder who has been carrying on a bit of an online romance, only to panic when the lass wants to meet him in person. It’s charming until a cop-out ending. From Palestine, “Ave Maria” pits a remote convent of nuns under a vow of silence with a stranded Jewish family in need of help but under Sabbath restrictions not to use a telephone. It’s a clever idea that could have been more fully developed.

“Shok” is a heavy-handed story of two boys during the Kosovo War. From Germany, “Alles Wird Gut” (“Everything Will Be Okay”) is a depressing story about a divorced man desperate to regain custody of his young daughter. Sad as it was, it’s a ray of sunshine next to “Day One,” about the grim experiences of a new army translator in Afghanistan. Suffice to say that she is called on to help a pregnant woman, and that by the mid point I was wishing that I hadn’t watched it. Both programs are at the Eastern Hills Cinema.

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A nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Mustang is set in the Black Sea region of Turkey. On their way home from the last day of school before summer vacation, five sisters engage in some lakeside horseplay with another group that includes some boys. An outraged gossip reports the incident to their grandmother, and in no time at all the girls are locked up, denied access to phones and the internet, and put into training to become wives. (Their age range seems to be about 12 to 17.)

While it isn’t what you would call a happy story, neither is it the melodrama you might be expecting. Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven and her writing collaborator Alice Winocour seem torn between critiquing Turkish traditions and maintaining a broad appeal, to the point where the whole film becomes blandly diluted. The girls have an unexplained back story (their parents are dead); there are vague hints that some or all of them may be being abused by an uncle—and that’s not a story element to be treated lightly; plot elements come and go at random with little apparent connection. It’s a not unpleasant film (with a lovely score by Warren Ellis of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds) on a subject that isn’t pleasant at all.  It opens Friday at the Amherst Theater.

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Romania’s entry for the Foreign Language Oscar (it didn’t make the final five), Aferim! takes place in 1835, at a time when gypsies were commonly enslaved. That this piece of information is apparently not widely known in Romania may explain the film’s appeal there as a history lesson. The minimal plot follows a constable and his son as they search for a slave escaped from the estate of a local nobleman. The journey is largely an excuse for conversations, between themselves and the people they meet, in which they reveal all kinds of ignorant prejudices about various non-Romanians; one priest rattles off a whole catalogue by country. Glumly filmed in mostly forest locations in natural light that makes the black-and-white photography greyer than it needs to be, it feels more like a trip back to the Middle Ages. Opens Friday at the North Park.

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By contrast, you can get a big pile of puppy love from Laurie Anderson when her essay film Heart of a Dog plays at Hallwalls next week. And count yourself lucky—it’s not in general theatrical release. The performance artist, who may best be known to mainstream audiences for her relationship with the late Lou Reed, begins with a dream of her dog Lolabelle that seems maudlin but quickly takes a hilarious left turn. From there, her ruminations take her from human/animal relations to topics of life in post-9/11 America, loneliness, and death in a way that only she can address them. (The composer of “O Superman” is exactly the person you want to hear commenting on the security obsessions of the past decade.)